Congee: The Humblest Recipe in Chinese Dietetics

There probably isn’t a more modest preparation in the entire Chinese culinary repertoire: rice, water, time. Congee (粥, zhōu) is breakfast across much of Asia, gets served to people recovering from illness, to children and to the elderly, and holds a place in Chinese dietetics that its simplicity belies. After four articles of theory (layered defence, Dampness and phlegm, the Wen Bing school), here’s one that ends in a pot.

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Why a porridge?

Take up the reasoning from the article on Dampness again. In Chinese physiology the Spleen turns food into useful substances, and whatever it fails to transform stagnates and clogs. Every meal puts a budget question to it: how much effort for how much nourishment extracted?

Congee is the thriftiest answer we know. Long cooking has already done most of the work of transformation. The starch is burst, the grain undone, the food halfway to liquid. It arrives warm, in a tradition wary of cold food as a small frost on digestion. It hydrates while it nourishes, and you’ll remember how the Wen Bing physicians fixated on fluids, rebuilding convalescence on broth and porridge. Nourish without overloading, moisten without clogging: few dishes hold both ends.

So the traditional uses follow: sluggish digestion, appetite gone flat, convalescence, cold winter mornings, or simply the morning after an excess. There’s no promise in any of that, and none is needed. It’s food, not a treatment. But it’s food with a thought behind it, and two thousand years of Asian breakfasts make for a decent stretch of experience.

The basic recipe

The only real difficulty is believing the ratio. It looks like far too much water. That’s exactly the move.

Ingredients (3-4 bowls):

• 1 cup (200 g) white rice, jasmine works very well; white rice is easier to digest than brown and is the better choice here
• 8 to 9 cups (2 L) water
• 1/2 tsp salt, at the end of cooking

Method:

1. Rinse the rice under cold water until the water runs more or less clear.
2. Put rice and water together in a large heavy-bottomed pot. Bring to a boil uncovered.
3. Lower to a bare simmer, cover with the lid ajar, and let it go for 1.5 to 2 hours. Stir now and then, scraping the bottom, especially in the last half hour.
4. It’s ready when the grains have burst and the whole thing forms a thick, pourable cream that keeps thickening as it cools. Too thick? A little hot water. Salt, taste.

In a slow cooker: same proportions, 8 hours on low, so the morning congee gets started at bedtime. It keeps three or four days in the fridge, and you loosen it with a little water when reheating.

Variations, according to temperament

Plain congee is a canvas. The tradition varies it endlessly; here are four directions, chosen to speak to the terrains this series has described.

Ginger and dried mandarin peel. A few slices of fresh ginger dropped in at the start, a ribbon of dried peel if you have it. This is the version that warms the centre, for people who wake up cold and digest slowly. It’s the variation closest to the “support the Spleen” spirit of the article on Dampness.

Jujubes and goji. Four or five pitted jujubes (red dates) from the beginning, a spoonful of goji berries in the last ten minutes. Natural sweetness, colour, and two ingredients Chinese dietetics files on the nourishing side.

Chicken and ginger. Cook the rice in homemade chicken broth instead of water and shred a little meat in at the end. The convalescent congee par excellence, and near enough to something a Cantonese grandmother and a Québécoise grandmother would end up claiming as their own.

Savoury, breakfast style. Plain underneath, covered at the table: green onion, cilantro, a soft-boiled egg, a few drops of soy sauce, roasted peanuts, sesame oil. This is the congee of the morning counters, the one that converts the sceptics.

A rule of assembly rather than a set of recipes: keep the base plain and long-cooked, add the delicate ingredients at the end, and go easy on large amounts of raw, cold garnish, which works against the whole idea of the dish.

The next article changes scale entirely. After the plate, the great maps of the body: the greater and lesser circulation, or how Chinese medicine draws the twenty-four-hour path of Qi.

And if the questions of digestive terrain raised here apply to you, people come to see us regularly with this kind of picture. Booking with an acupuncturist in Montreal is done online through Jane.